Meta

Web metric basics

We talked yesterday about email metrics; now it’s Web site metrics’ turn.

We start here with the most generic of all online metrics: traffic. No less an authority that FiveThirtyEight says that we still don’t know how to measure Web traffic. The difference is how unique visitors are measured versus total visits. If you are an advertiser, you want to make sure the 1,000,000 visits a person is claiming to her/his site aren’t just a guy hitting reload over and over again. This can be done by cookie, by IP address.

My advice on this is sacrilegious for a metrics guy: don’t worry too much about it as long as you are using a consistent system for measurement. I’ve used mainly Google Analytics for this, because it’s free, but any system will have its own way of determining this.

From this number, you can derive revenue per visitor by simply dividing your annual online revenues by your number of visitors to determine revenue per visitor. This is a nice benchmark because you can see what all of your optimization efforts add up to; everything you do to try to get someone to a donation page, what you do to convert them, your average gift tweaking, the value you derive from your email list — all of it adds up to revenue per visitor.

But more than that, revenue per visitor also allows you to see what you are willing to invest to get someone to your site. Let’s say your revenue per visitor is right at the M+R Benchmarks Report 2016 average of $.65 per visitor. If the average blog post you do results in an extra 1000 visitors to your site, you should in theory be willing to pay up to $650 to write, deliver, and market that blog post (because revenue per visitor is an annual figure, so acquiring someone at cost that you can then engage in the future is a beautiful thing).

I say in theory because revenue per visitor varies based on the type of content or interaction. I’ll talk about this at the end because we need to go through the other metrics to break this down more efficiently.

A close cousin to revenue per visitor is site donation conversion rate, or how many of the people who come to your site donate. Instead of dividing your annual online revenues by visitors, you’ll divide the number of donations by visitors. This is one of two key inputs to revenue per visitor (the other being average gift) and is a good way of testing whether wholesale changes to your site are helping encourage people to give.

I recently worked with someone who put a thin banner at the top of their site encouraging donation. He was disheartened because less than half a percent of the people who came to the site clicked on the banner. I asked him if the total clicks were additive to donation clicks (that is, they represented people who wouldn’t have clicked to donate otherwise) or substitutive (that is, total donation clicks didn’t go up; they just moved from another donate button to this bar). We were able to tell not only because of the donation clicks went up over baseline, but because the site donation conversation rate went up. Now we are working on a strategy to test this bar throughout the site and with different context-specific asks.

Drilling down from the site donation conversion rate is the page donation conversion rate. This is people who donate to a donation page divided by visitors to your donation page. It’s a standard measure of the quality of your donation page. This and average donation on a donation page combine to create the revenue per page.

Revenue per page is not only a good way of measuring which donation form is better — it’s a good way of getting a feel for the valuable content on your site. See how many of the people who come to a page end up donating directly from the page (you can do sophisticated attribution models to determine this — going directly to a donation is a quick and dirty way of doing it) and what their average gift is. Divide that by the number of visitors you have to that page and you can see what the revenue per page is on a non-donation page as well.

This is great information to have. Let’s say the value of a visitor to your home page is 10 cents, to a program page is 20 cents, and to an advocacy page is 40 cents. This helps you make decisions about your content. Do you need better calls to action on your program page? What should be your next home page feature? (Answer: probably something about advocacy) Where should you direct the bulk of your Google Grant traffic? Etc.

However, there is one thing missing from all of this. You will note that I said site donation conversion rate and page donation conversion rate. Usually metrics folks won’t put donation in there — it’s implied.

But there’s another conversion rate that’s vitally important and that’s conversion to a constituent. Remember that the conversion to donation process often is a series of smaller steps. You need constituents who subscribe to your email newsletter, volunteer for your activities, and read your social media posts (OK, maybe not that last one). A person has given you permission to talk to them is a valuable thing and should not be forgotten about.

So there’s also a site constituent conversion rate and page constituent conversion rate — how good are your pages at capturing people. Only when you have this to add to your revenue per page do you have a true measure of page quality.

But wait! How do you add people converted to revenue?

That’s the topic for tomorrow as we discuss how to value a constituent.